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People who keep dismissing those who are constructively critical of the Obama administration seem to believe that everything doesn't tie together. A magical all-powerful Obama, like the one people naively imagined existed up until November 2008, isn't going to suddenly materialize in time to get Democrats higher poll numbers.

It's pointless to have these arguments about how horrible people like me are for criticizing the president because it "makes him look bad." Nothing on earth is going to stop his opponents from making him look bad, and the fact that he's not trying to make himself look good isn't helping.

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(Please remember, of course, that the only reason I am posting this is because like all liberals I am just, like, totally afraid of Sarah!!1!)

A high level Pakistani diplomat has been rejected as Ambassador of Saudi Arabia because his name, Akbar Zib, equates to "Biggest Dick" in Arabic.

The best legislative system in the world, folks.

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I'm sure Chris Matthews meant something with this, but damned if I know what.

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To answer Marshall's (possibly rhetorical) question, though, here's what they were thinking: that they could get away with it. It's really that simple, no more, no less. O'Keefe already broke the law once and got away with it. He is being sued for his ACORN stunt by multiple people. It is illegal to do what he did, but he got away with it, partially because he attacked an incompetently-run organization that was incompetently run by black people trying to help black people, and partially because the outcry over what he doctored a video to "uncover" in the minds of a largely-racist and largely anti-Democrat noise machine overwhelmed that fact.

Our nation has a history of paranoid whackjobs, separated into two distinct columns of praise and ridicule solely by success. Linda Tripp got away with it. Nixon would have gotten away with it if his insane crimes actually revealed overwhelming dirt. And if a guy tackled Obama at a campaign event claiming that the president was secretly one of the aliens from "They Live" and it turned out it was true, no one would care about his crime either. Crimes of the paranoid are simply a gamble. They pay off if you are right. They usually don't, because they're insane.

The most startling bit of this, however, is how O'Keefe horrifically is defending himself as a "journalist." Of all his actions, that's truly the one that needs to be fought most vocally and viciously because it's the one that sets the most dangerous precedent, and of all his actions I actually find the most irrational. Breaking the law, doctoring footage, tampering with sources, and manipulating your story for a preconceived conclusion are all examples of not being a journalist, or at the very least, a bad one.

I don't know why this is so hard to interpret. O'Keefe is rich, white, Republican, and as Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy prove, trying to do something crazy and illegal is not much of a risk in the long run when you have that going for you.

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The people blindly supporting the existence of Obama as president ignore the inverse meaning of why nothing is "his fault." I am not looking forward to his 2012 campaign being one of blaming everyone else for why he hasn't done a damn thing.

True believers can enjoy an article from the Washington Post that ran this same week, revealing that the incoming Obama administration's grand strategy for running the country was going to be, quite literally, hope. By that I meant they hoped that everyone just went along with their ideas. The Democrats and their largest majority in a generation were defeated by the unprecedented action of Republicans opposing them. Please try not to cry.

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As my friend Tom Tomorrow would say, real life happens.

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Pollak's Theory of Editorial Cartoon Sucktitude: the greater a tragic news story, the lamer and less sincere the editorial cartoon about it. When you have an earthquake that kills hundreds of thousands of people, the crappiness destroys all previous charts. 9/11 had better cartoons than this, and I imagine in a lot of cases it's because American cartoonists actually felt something about their country instead of a quick and easy way to meet a deadline.

Sympathy cartoons are the poison of the political cartoon industry: a moment when cartoonists from across the nation collectively pretend they really liked that celebrity, really felt that a country was in dire straits, and have always wanted to give blood. But more than that, they realize a a quick teardrop on a picture of an eagle means they can leave early and avoid traffic. As you can imagine, I have few friends in this industry.

The cartoon referenced in the last panel is real. Someone drew it. It exists. I could not possibly make that up.

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But I digress: this e-mail from TPM caps off the finishing point of what has been a years-long disaster culminating in a right-wing teabagger becoming a Senator from the most liberal state in America, who will cap the legacy of Ted Kennedy by killing the health care reform bill:

A lot of the politics in Mass is resentment-based and provincial; resenting the Frasier Crane snobs at Harvard is a pasttime, and rejecting outsiders is a matter of course (John Henry and the other Red Sox Owners were vehemently rejected by the Boston masses for the first year or two, because they won the team over a Mass native (Frank McCourt)). Why Obama didn't plunk himself down in Northampton yesterday to immediately End Don't Ask Don't Tell is beyond me. He's been neglecting his base with almost a sense of disdain, as he tries to cozy up to Republicans for some unknown, fruitless reason. Clearly, it doesn't win over Independents like it did in 2008.

I've said this both offline and on so often now I've become bored with it, but Democrats had a chance to fix this months ago. Ted Kennedy, who was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer- let me repeat that, terminal brain cancer- in May of 2008 decided that a special election for his replacement scheduled on the most pro-Democrat Election Day in a generation was simply unnecessary. Then I pointed out in July that maybe it would be a good idea to replace Kennedy with someone who could, oh I don't know, physically show up to vote for stuff. Oh, and as Oliver noted today, let's not forget the wonderful job Harry Reid did of letting Max Baucus dick around with health care for half a year, because that worked out really well in the end, didn't it?

The total failure of Democratic Party foresight, the stubborn naivete of the Kennedy wing, and Obama's absolute capitulation to imaginary bipartisanship are going to result in that bipartisanship Obama claimed he wanted: one more Republican to deal with. And it's entirely the Democrats' fault, no matter how many times you want to pick out progressive bloggers to blame because They're So Mean.™ There aren't any Republicans to blame here- they did everything right.